


Our love's confusing, but it never gets dull

by Tyleet



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, listfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-12
Updated: 2011-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:03:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Tyleet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These are the things he knows about River Song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our love's confusing, but it never gets dull

**Author's Note:**

> Set post A Christmas Carol, pre The Impossible Astronaut. Originally published in slightly different form in an alt journal. The title's from "Ache for You", by Ben Lee.

 

It's just after Christmas, and he has married Marilyn Monroe, seen sharks swim in the air, and listened to the most beautiful music. Amy and Rory are off doing--human things--in their bedroom, the TARDIS is parked in 19th century Leeds conducting some necessary repairs on herself, and the Doctor decides to do a bit of light reading. 

He's just settled down into a very cozy velvet armchair that he thinks belonged to his seventh self when the door to the library opens, and River Song steps inside, shifting blue light from the swimming pool playing over her skin. He shuts the book. "I suppose asking you how you got inside would be fairly useless, would it?" 

"Hello, sweetie," she says calmly, and comes and sits on the edge of the coffee table, picking the book up off his lap. "Gravity's Rainbow? Really?" 

"It's been on my list for a hundred years or so," he tells her, raising an eyebrow. "Brilliant theorist, Pynchon. Liked a banana. I appreciate that, in a man."

"Absolutely," she murmurs, tracing the cover with one sharp-edged fingernail. "But what was his thing about kazoos?" 

"That's a mystery," the Doctor says, and steeples his fingers. "What can I do for you, River Song?" Usually she is dangerous, bright-eyed, swinging just ahead of a pack of angry villagers armed with atomic bombs. Tonight, all he's getting from her is a general tiredness, the shadows beneath her eyes very dark. 

She shrugs. "I couldn't sleep. I know I'm early, but--is it all right if I stay here, for a while? I could read for a bit." 

He actually isn't sure. If it were just him, yes, but there's his humans to think of, unaware and off-guard in their bunk-beds, and he already doesn't like that a madwoman can walk into his ship whenever she wants to, that she broke out of prison and traveled back thirty four centuries to find him because she had insomnia. He doesn't know enough about her to fill both sides of a piece of copy paper, let alone a journal. He has questions. Too many questions, still. 

"All right," he says, without consciously deciding to say yes. "Pick out whatever you like. Harry Potter's nice." 

She smiles at him. 

These are the things he knows about River Song:

1\. She has hazel eyes, calloused palms, and a graying tangle of hair.

2\. She is partial to 5th century baklava.

3\. When she calls on him, he comes.

 4. She is going to die for him. He thinks it will happen in a library, in a room full of shadows, and she will become yet another of his girls bursting into unfathomable killing light.

But he knows that isn’t the only way it could happen. She has died for him, for example, in a museum at the end of all things, holding fast to his companions and waiting for him to reboot the universe. She could as easily die again tomorrow, by taking a shot meant for him or getting caught in a prison riot or equipment malfunction or by slipping on a banana peel at Villengard. She’s _human_ , and despite their wonderful resilience as a species, they’re terrifyingly fragile individually. Every moment River Song is alive is another moment she could die and rip apart their pasts and futures. Weaving their timelines together is really incredibly dangerous in the first place—he can’t imagine why he’ll do it. Still, he looks after his mistakes, even those he hasn’t made yet, so he visits the Library, now and again. When he’s between companions, or when he wants to talk to someone he won’t have to explain himself to. (Sometimes she isn’t there, and those are the times he shows up in her timeline un-summoned.) The universe isn’t kind enough to let her live, and if she dies for him, at least this way she’ll be safe.

 5. He is going to be the most mysterious, enigmatic, ludicrously smug bastard he’s ever been in any of his lives when she meets him for the first time. With smirking. There will definitely be smirking.

 6. She trusts him. More than anyone really should.

 7. She will kill a man. A hero. The best man she’s ever known. He’s arrogant enough to believe it’s him. Some version of him, anyway. This version of him.

 8. Despite knowing this, he trusts her.

 9. She carries handcuffs with her wherever she goes.

 10. She is not a child. Well, comparatively, of course she is—not more than half a century on her, if that—but speaking technically _, Rory Williams_ is older than he is, so clearly comparisons are odious. River’s different, and it’s not just because she’s from his future. By the accounting of her kind, and more, by her own account, River Song is very much grown up. Much as he’d like to deny it, this old man does prefer the company of the young. Most of the time. It’s strange to feel equal, once again. 

 11. He was nine hundred and six when he met her for the first time, and she pressed a hand to the side of his face and said helplessly that he looked so _young_. 

 12. He will not teach her to pilot the TARDIS, but she knows how anyway.

 13. She is/has been/will be his wife, but neither expects nor offers fidelity.

Once, before Amy, in that sweet getting-to-know-you jaunt he took his TARDIS on after regenerating, he found her in the middle of an interplanetary crisis with a quiet sister of the Forests of Cheem sticking close to her shadow. For once River wasn’t expecting him, and her eyes were surprised and glad. “Hello, sweetie,” she said, teasing as always, but immediately cast a reassuring smile at the tree sister, who slid even closer and looked at him guardedly.

He'd fallen in with a time-travelling Silurian and her Victorian maid, who claimed they knew him in the future, and he supposed it was true, from the wary looks they kept giving River. Like they'd heard things. Not that he'd ask.  

 “But the rumors say she's married to the Doctor,” he overheard Jenny muttering later. They were staring at River piloting the ship with one hand slid around Sylef’s waist, of course, because they were Earth-natives and couldn’t have enough of blogging.

 “Don’t be ridiculous, of course she is,” Madame Vastra returned, casting a pointed glance at the Doctor, who wass re-programming the planet core’s sub-atomic regulator and thereby _saving all of their lives_ and definitely not paying attention. “But they are warriors. Their lives are harsh, and dangerous, and their love fierce but fast. I'd imagine that in their circumstances, monogamy would quickly become dull." 

The Doctor really was saving the day, so he tuned out Jenny's predictably combative response, and didn’t really think about it until the day was properly saved and they were all about to pile back into the TARDIS again so he could start dispensing lifts home.

 “Should I try to remember her name?” he asked River just a little snidely. It’s not that he minded, really—he’d just prefer to know the terms of any arrangement he’d entered into, whether or not he’d actually entered into it yet.

 "Last month," River said in a deceptively mild tone, "A blonde girl with a very big gun materialized in my cell with me. She was looking for you." Oh. "I recognized her name, of course. But how could I not?" He winced. Rose was in the history books now--had been for quite some time, thanks to Jack. 

"Point very much taken," he acknowledged. 

 “Sweetie,” she said when he turned to go, and pressed both her hands to his shoulders, leaning in, so her hair drifted across his cheek and her lips brushed his ear. It’s the closest they’d ever actually been. Well, he’d ever actually been. “I’m always glad to see you.”

 14. One day, he will tell her his name.

 15. She isn’t his companion. She is daring and disrespectful and creative and ruthless, and she’s nothing like the other loves of his lives: young and wondering and hands in his. She’s a guard at his back, tempered with an edged curiosity, a weapon already forged. History has her down as River Song, full stop. He’s seen her name before, in books, news articles, top-secret government communications—but he always resists the temptation to read the entries.

 16. He can no longer imagine this life without her, and that’s _dangerous_. 

She's told him that’s half the fun.

 17. She’s safe. She is. She will be. Supposing he manages to get her to the day he cries under the singing towers of Darillium, she’ll be kept as safe as technology and one sad little girl can make her. And if she sometimes looks at him sideways while he stands at her side watching two small children play in a park—if she sometimes presses her digital palm to his face and smiles in that way that means _Oh,_ _Doctor, I know something you don’t know_ \--he makes himself forget. He stands in front of an information plinth with cool, impersonal gray-green eyes and a nose broken twice that he knows of, and lets her tell him the date and time and lists of reference numbers. He tries not to think about anything.  


 18. But he can’t forget, not really. He never could. The Library is destroyed in the 83rd century, when someone—some predictable, selfish human--finally gets fed up with the idea that a whole planet exists that no one’s allowed to touch, the books all turned to ash with the first explosion, the vashta nerada swallowed up by the black of space, the planet’s leftover pieces sold on the black market. He knows this, because he looked it up. He knows to the second how much time it will take to transfer five slightly more than data ghosts to the TARDIS core.

19\. She is absolutely infuriating.

 20. He’s never caught up with her. He never will.

It's the day after Christmas, for some value of day, and the humans are all asleep. River is breathing softly in a velvet armchair of her own, leg flung carelessly over one arm, her wild hair spilling down the back. Her eyes are closed, and _The Prisoner of Azkaban_ is open in her lap. He doesn't know what she is to him, yet. He still doesn't know her very well. Later, before Amy and Rory wake up, he will offer her tea and custard--the one thing the TARDIS reliably stocks in the kitchen--and drop her back at Stormcage. Forget about whatever it is she's so obviously mourning. Put her out of his thoughts for a time. 

"You'd be better off sleeping in a bed," he tells her quietly, and she sighs. Not quite asleep, then. 

"This is better," she murmurs, drowsy, eyes still closed. "Where I can keep an eye on you." 

He can't help it; he smiles. "Go to sleep, River Song." 

The questions will wait. 

 


End file.
